1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging apparatus, an imaging system, and an imaging method, and specifically relates to an imaging apparatus, an imaging system, and an imaging method capable of shooting objects, classifying these shot object images, and displaying advice information for a shooter according to the result thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, an image viewing method has become widely popular, in which images are taken with an imaging apparatus such as a digital camera and transmitted utilizing a communication facility such as PC communication, the Internet, or a mobile phone line, and the images are viewed in this environment. By using such a communication facility, people can enjoy images in such various ways that people can post up photographs taken by themselves on blog pages or the like to allow many other people to view the photographs, or people can transmit images to a large-size TV screen to allow viewing of the images by many people at the same time.
In a time of conventional silver-halide films, people were concerned about film consumption or expenses for development and could only enjoy to take one final image, but the image viewing has been changed in the above described present environment from viewing the one final image to enjoying many images as a piece of work. When enjoying a series of images such as in a photo album, people desire a photo album that one can understand a shooting situation easily by viewing multiple images without any particular explanation.
For example, even if photograph images of a grandchild's event such as a field day or a performance day are transmitted to a reproducing apparatus such as a TV set in a house of their grandparents who can not go to view the photographs, the grandparents can not feel the atmosphere sufficiently with only an image of their grandchild playing a sport and desire to view a photograph of their child who is a parent of the grandchild. In this manner, when images are easily transmitted to remote people in addition to people close to a shooter, there are also frequently required object images which the shooter is not particularly conscious of.
Further, as shown in FIG. 9, when an image taken with a camera is displayed on a screen of a TV 20 and viewed by a family, even family members other than a person of the image object are not much interested therein, if only the person too frequently appears in the screen. If the image shows a place or a site where the event was held or people who watched the event, a high realistic sensation can be transmitted and people other than the person of the shooting object can enjoy the image which is appreciable enough.
For shooting an image such as one in which people other than a person of the shooting object are interested in, an image recognition technique becomes important for a camera to assist the shooting. Recently, there has been widely used a technique detecting a face portion from an image in consumer oriented cameras in addition to security cameras (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-101111 (published on Apr. 13, 2006, hereinafter, referred to as Prior Art 1), a technique determining similarity of images on the Internet, or the like. Further, a technique connecting a camera wirelessly to the Internet, a technique displaying content on the Internet on a home appliance, etc. are being widely used.
In an imaging apparatus disclosed in the above Prior Art 1, a shot image is preliminarily stored in a file for matching and another shot image is determined whether or not it matches the image stored in the file for matching, and then, according to this matching result, it can be confirmed whether a desired shooting object has been shot or not.
Further, in an image processing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-287014 (published on Nov. 1, 2007) or the like, there is proposed a technique for displaying images classified for each event by classifying persons taken in the images. However, each of these disclosed techniques is a technique for a user to remember shooting of images which the user decided to shoot preliminarily.
Still further, in a camera disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-166250 (published on Jun. 28, 2007), there is proposed a technique to indicate a picture composition to a shooter. However, this technique is just for assisting a user to decide the picture composition.
Although cameras are employing many kinds of techniques widening a control rage of exposure or focusing, widening a field angle range by a zoom lens, or the like for improving a shooting range, many users tend to shoot only similar objects using similar picture compositions in similar situations, and therefore have not fully utilized such a potential capability of the camera.